“The techniques used to burgle Green Effect come from parkour, a physical discipline and recreational activity of French origin whose practitioners are called traceurs. Sometimes confused with free running, a related discipline derived from parkour, the art, as it is called by some practitioners, has gained in popularity in urban areas, particularly in Europe, during the early 21st century.”
That’s my epigram. To discuss a masterpiece, one needs an epigram. “Breaking and Entering” is a very constructed movie and yet one’s emotions can go “free running” through it, exactly because it is so solidly fitted together. “Breaking and entering,” aside from meaning burglary, is an oxymoron. How can you “enter” a broken thing? Even if it’s a relationship? If it’s a country? Or does the break let you in? Anyway, there is a third step that’s not in the title: “healing,” corny as that concept has become, or maybe “returning.”
Minghella also directed “The English Patient,” one of my favorite movies, which was supposed to be unfilmable. I think the reason he succeeds is his own internal structure of interacting polarities which he uses like the grid under the chess pieces to hold them in relationship, playing them against each other, something like the two young people nimbly negotiating unyielding structures. It’s certainly amazing to watch.
The “interacting polarities” (I’m sorry that sounds so pretentious.) includes the nature of the characters who are also in pairs: the glacial, northern, impassive woman who cannot get enough sun against the passionate, generous woman who radiates warmth; the architect with visions and dreams versus the near-engineer who wants sound building. It extends to the unbuilding and rebuilding of King’s Cross, destroying it in order to save it.
Minghella said that one of the most compelling images, the fox, was NOT a metaphor, though EVERYTHING in life is a metaphor. I think he means that it arrived by itself. The fox population must be cleaning up the rats displaced by building destruction. They are really there, occupying the ecological niche of cats but rather better prepared to tackle big rats and finding the city safer than the country where the chief predator is the gentry. The witty human equivalent is the prostitute. Minghella says that when one walks down the street, the musky reek of fox can fume out of corners. They didn’t have to use a trained fox, just watch for chances to film wild foxes.
The other overwhelming “trope” was that of glass which comes out in the cinematography: windshields, windows, skylights, “reed glass” (that grooved glass the English seem to love), binoculars, the glass screens of computers, the “sun box”. It’s such an obvious and common practice in movies that we hardly notice, except that Minghella adds lenses and focus, the camera as window. Some scenes are so out-of-focus one can hardly tell what’s happening. Yet the compelling scene of the architect and his mate undressing in front of the mirrored doors of their huge closet was “found” rather than planned. Minghella calls it “the choreography of the eye” and praises the immense power of stillness, frozen action.
Then there’s color: the high-brow cream-colored house we see everywhere in magazines was not “set-dressed” but found. The navy/black clothing is also in sophisticated magazines but the riotous ethnic colors of the Bosnians is in less exalted magazines. So one of the challenges in the story is that of luxury markers: the displaced peoples of “low class” countries turn out to be just as intelligent and savvy as the supposed superiors.
In an art book or class somewhere I learned to distinguish between the Gothic cathedral era which reached always “up,” aspiring into the sky, a religious trope; versus the Renaissance buildings that were expansive sideways -- like Henry VIII. Architecture is an inhabitable art form that plays these two off each other, with landscape architecture existing as another oxymoron. Minghella avoids the grids of roads in order to pick up the web of canals through London, lined with exuberant vegetation. Ironically the “council housing” looks so beautiful in the camera that Minghella said they had to go back and find some tough, ugly stuff to convey the reality of tiny apartments. Maybe it’s the places for things to grow, mostly weeds. The most raw emotion of the plot is expressed in a groomed park on the long slope of a hill crowned by a gorgeous classical building.
As you can tell, I was almost more fascinated by Minghella’s discussion of the movie than by the movie itself. He said the basic idea had been in his mind for fifteen years, so I suspect that much of it was formed deep in his subconscious and then emerged as a surprise to himself, a discovery. Once he got hold of a plot element, though, like the parkour free running (fox! -- and they WILL climb like cats but by leaping rather than clawing) he knew to research it and use what he found. He said that what at first seemed like the most organic, dream-like and personal of elements turned out to be “concrete” events of the real world. How could any artist ask for more than that? The wisdom is to go with it.
Shooting London is definitely “going with it,” particularly when he used so many of the seasoned English actors from BBC mysteries, rough and raw as they know to portray. Jude Law himself actually lives in that Kings Cross part of town, albeit in a gentrified place. The office of the film company, working out of the warehouse office in the movie, was burglarized repeatedly.
Minghella is dead of a “breaking and losing” -- a hemorrhage after surgery for tonsil cancer in 2008 -- and I grieve for the lost movies, though I didn’t like all of the real ones. “Cold Mountain” left me, well, cold. But one of his productions has lived in my imagination for years though it wasn’t even a movie and I’ve never seen it. It was the Met production of "Madame Butterfly" that used a life-sized bunraku puppet for Butterfly’s little boy. (Bunraku puppets are operated by people who are right there in plain sight, but dressed in black.) I haven’t finished exploring YouTube Butterfly snippets, but it’s clear that Minghella's Chinese wife, Carolyn Choa, a choreographer and director, understands human architecture of movement. Part of Minghella’s genius was pulling in collaborators, his vision becoming a stage for their dance.
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